Europe Is Locking Prediction Markets Out. A No-Wager Challenger Sees an Opening.

Regulators across the continent are blocking Polymarket and Kalshi as unlicensed gambling. SafeBets is betting that a platform without a wager can claim the ground the incumbents are losing.

The prediction-market boom that swept the United States has hit a wall in Europe. Over the past eighteen months, one national regulator after another has moved to shut the two dominant platforms, Polymarket and Kalshi, out of its market. France’s gambling authority, the AutoriteNationale des Jeux, investigated Polymarket and concluded its services could amount to unauthorized gambling, prompting the platform to geoblock French users; it has since described both Polymarket and Kalshi as illegal in France and warned the public away. Spain went further this spring, with its gambling regulator ordering internet providers to block both platforms in May 2026 pending disciplinary proceedings. Portugal and Hungary issued bans early in the year, Belgium blacklisted Polymarket, and Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Switzerland, Poland and others have restricted access on licensing grounds.

What makes Europe so inhospitable is partly structural. There is no single European market for this activity and no equivalent of America’s federal-versus-state preemption fight to resolve. Gambling is regulated nation by nation, each member state with its own licensing regime, its own list of prohibited categories, and in some cases its own state betting monopoly. A platform that wants to operate legally across the continent must satisfy more than two dozen separate regulators, most of whom have already reached the same conclusion.

And the conclusion is strikingly uniform. Across Europe, prediction markets are treated either as illegal gambling or as unlicensed financial instruments, and the gambling classification dominates. Spain’s regulator put the logic plainly: these are games of chance whenever bets are placed on uncertain future events and offering them requires a license neither platform holds. Nearly every European action rests on that same chain of reasoning. A bet on an uncertain outcome is gambling; gambling requires a national license; the platforms do not have one; therefore, they must go.

Read that chain closely and one link carries all the weight. Every one of these enforcement actions turns on the wager, the moment a user puts money at risk on an uncertain event. That act is what European gambling law is built to catch.

Which is precisely the act one newcomer has designed out of its product. SafeBets.world, operated by the New York-based company Foresight Collective, Inc., is a prediction platform on which users place no wager at all. Participants forecast the future prices of assets across crypto, commodity, stock, and currency markets. They make no deposit and stake nothing. The platform scores each forecast against real, time-stamped market outcomes and rewards its most accurate predictors, but those rewards are not drawn from other users’ losses. They are funded by a separate, affiliated trading operation that acts on the aggregated judgment of the platform’s best forecasters. No participant can lose money, because no participant puts any at risk.

That design is the heart of the company’s European thesis. Because there is no wager, SafeBets argues, it does not meet the definition of gambling that regulators from Paris to Madrid have used to bar its rivals. If that argument holds, the platform could operate in markets where Polymarket and Kalshi cannot, which would position it as a rare thing in European prediction markets: a contender for leadership in a category that, at the moment, has no legal incumbent across most of the continent.

The opening is real, and so is the latent demand. Europeans have shown the same appetite for forecasting that drove the American boom; what they have lacked is a platform their regulators will tolerate. A service that can credibly place itself outside the gambling perimeter, by not being a bet in the first place, would have much of that ground to itself.

The argument should be weighed with care, however, because it is untested. No European regulator has ruled on SafeBets, and the continent’s defenses are not built from gambling law alone. A model that pays rewards funded by trading, and that touches crypto assets, could draw attention under the European Union’s financial-instruments framework or its crypto-asset rules, which operate independently of the gambling regimes. The fragmentation that frustrates the incumbents cuts both ways: clearing one regulator is not clearing twenty-seven. And some of the concerns European authorities cite, including the French regulator’s warning that these platforms foster an illusion of competence among ordinary users, do not disappear simply because the stake does. The company’s position is that removing the wager removes the legal trigger. Europe’s regulators have not yet said whether they agree.

Still, the strategic logic is hard to ignore. Europe’s crackdown has produced a vacuum: substantial demand, and no platform able to serve it lawfully at scale. The first operator that can convince regulators it sits outside the gambling definition, rather than merely insisting its bets are trades, would inherit a continent. SafeBets is wagering, so to speak, that a platform built on no wager at all is that operator.